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Manila
5/23/2017
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Sameer Totey
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CSCI 7818 – Web Technologies.
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Introduction
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Manila is an Internet server application
that allows groups of writers, designers
and graphics people to manage fullfeatured, high performance Web sites
through an easy-to-use browser
interface.
Manila is included as part of the
UserLand Frontier content management
system, an $899 commercial product for
Windows and Macintosh.
Student version costs $299
Version 5.01 of Frontier is still available
free, however
it does not contain Manila 2
Sameer Totey
Manila featuers
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Manila turns the Web into an easy and
powerful multi-user writing environment
that's accessible to anyone who knows
how to use a browser
It is a substitute for HTML editors, word
processors, FTP clients and
collaboration groupware like Lotus
Notes.
It allows browser based editing of web
sites
Edit this page buttons are present
everywhere. This simulates web that is
write-readSameer
instead
Totey of read-only.
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Manila demo
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Creating a website using Manila is very
easy
- Cookies and caching.
Anyone who can use a web browser can
become a web editor !
Unlike other tools that allow users to
create web sites easily Manila is flexible
and scalable.
- It has scriptable power
Manila provides advanced features that
are optional.
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Manila Basics
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Membership and roles
- Managing Editor, Contributing Editor, Member,
Visitor
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Types of Manila Sites
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- Brochure sites, Essay sites, Community sites,
Newsroom sites
Everything is stored as a message in the
Manila Database, manila.root which is part of
Frontier database frontier.root
- Some Messages are stories, some are pictures,
others are plain discussion group messages.
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Frontier's object database is organized much
like your computer's desktop, but instead of
folders or directories Frontier has tables
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How Manila works
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Manila is a serving process.
All contents are stored as
messages
When a user access a web page
the Manila serving process renders
the page on the users browser.
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Message #1234
Text…picture…shortcut...text
Check visitor membership
Wrap template around the message
Run macros (title etc.)
Convert Shortcut into link
Insert picture
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Sameer Totey
Server finished page
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Performance
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Easy to create and change, what about
performance
Static Rendering
- Static rendering means creating .html files from
your Manila website and saving them to disk.
This creates a traditional website, the kind that
can be served by non-Manila servers such as
Apache, WebSTAR, and IIS, servers that are
optimized for serving static files from disk. Your
static server doesn't know about Manila -- it
doesn't need to.
- Static rendering options are part of Frontier.
5/23/2017
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Flexible
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You can control many aspects of
website appearance and functions
through preferences.
Syndication preference
Searching preference
Advanced preferences
- Navigation, templates, site structure, javascripts
etc.
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UserLand
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All UserLand products and
services complement each other
and tied together in that sense.
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Issues
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No Enterprise database support.
No Spell checker !
Security not clear
May not be ideal for Enterprise
solution but serves almost all other
needs
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Future
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Web becoming synonymous with
Internet because applications of all
other Internet protocol are being
usurped by the “web”
Products like Manila help create
superior newsgroups on the web,
will make usenet and NNTP
eventually obsolete
Helping evolve WWW to become
write-read in a limited sense
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